"It's real, Larry," Alan said. "Freaky, huh?"
"That's terrible," the Greek said. "Pah." There were five or six other
network users out on the Greek's, and it was early yet. By five-thirty,
there'd be fifty of them. Some of them brought their own power strips so
that they could share juice with their coreligionists.
"You really want me to give up?" Kurt asked, once the Greek had given
him a new beer and a scowling look over the litter of picked-at beer
label on the table before him.
"I really think you should," Alan said. "It's a poor use of time."
Kurt looked ready to cry again. Adam had no idea what to say.
"Okay," Kurt said. "Fine." He finished his beer in silence and slunk
away.
#
But it wasn't fine, and Kurt wouldn't give it up. He kept on beating his
head against the blank wall, and every time Alan saw him, he was grimmer
than the last.
"Let it *go*," Adam said. "I've done a deal with the vacuum-cleaner
repair guy across the street." A weird-but-sweet old Polish Holocaust
survivor who'd listened attentively to Andy's pitch before announcing
that he'd been watching all the hardware go up around the Market and had
simply been waiting to be included in the club. "That'll cover that
corner just fine."
"I'm going to throw a party," Kurt said. "Here, in the shop. No, I'll
rent out one of the warehouses on Oxford. I'll invite them, the kids,
everyone who's let us put up an access point, a big mill-and-swill. Buy
a couple kegs. No one can resist free beer."
Alan had started off frustrated and angry with Kurt, but this drew him
up and turned him around. "That is a *fine* idea," he said. "We'll
invite Lyman."
#
Lyman had taken to showing up on Alan's stoop in the morning sometimes,
on his way to work, for a cup of coffee. He'd taken to showing up at
Kurt's shop in the afternoon, sometimes, on his way home from work, to
marvel at the kids' industry. His graybeard had written some code that
analyzed packet loss and tried to make guesses about the crowd density
in different parts of the Market, and Lyman took a proprietary interest
in it, standing out by Bikes on Wheels or the Portuguese furniture store
and watching the data on his PDA, comparing it with the actual crowds on
the street.
He'd only hesitated for a second when Andrew asked him to be the
inaugural advisor on ParasiteNet's board, and once he'd said yes, it
became clear to everyone that he was endlessly fascinated by their
little adhocracy and its experimental telco potential.
"This party sounds like a great idea," he said. He was buying the
drinks, because he was the one with five-hundred-dollar glasses and a
full-suspension racing bike. "Lookit that," he said.
From the Greek's front window, they could see Oxford Street and a little
of Augusta, and Lyman loved using his PDA and his density analysis
software while he sat, looking from his colored map to the crowd
scene. "Lookit the truck as it goes down Oxford and turns up
Augusta. That signature is so distinctive, I could spot it in my
sleep. I need to figure out how to sell this to someone -- maybe the
cops or something." He tipped Andy a wink.
Kurt opened and shut his mouth a few times, and Lyman slapped his palm
down on the table. "You look like you're going to bust something," he
said. "Don't worry. I kid. Damn, you've got you some big, easy-to-push
buttons."
Kurt made a face. "You wanted to sell our stuff to luxury hotels. You
tried to get us to present at the *SkyDome*. You're capable of
anything."
"The SkyDome would be a great venue for this stuff," Lyman said settling
into one of his favorite variations of bait-the-anarchist.
"The SkyDome was built with tax-dollars that should have been spent on
affordable housing, then was turned over to rich pals of the premier for
a song, who then ran it into the ground, got bailed out by the province,
and then it got turned over to different rich pals. You can just shut up
about the goddamned SkyDome. You'd have to break both of my legs and
*carry me* to get me to set foot in there."
"About the party," Adam said. "About the party."
"Yes, certainly," Lyman said. "Kurt, behave."
Kurt belched loudly, provoking a scowl from the Greek.
#
The Waldos all showed up in a bunch, with plastic brown liter bottles
filled with murky homemade beer and a giant bag of skunk-weed. The party
had only been on for a couple hours, but it had already balkanized into
inward-facing groups: merchants, kids, hackers. Kurt kept turning the
music way up ("If they're not going to talk with one another, they might
as well dance." "Kurt, those people are old. Old people don't dance to
music like this." "Shut up, Lyman." "Make me."), and Andy kept turning
it down.
The bookstore people drifted in, then stopped and moved vaguely toward
the middle of the floor, there to found their own breakaway
conversational republic. Lyman startled. "Sara?" he said and one of the
anarchists looked up sharply.
"Lyman?" She had two short ponytails and a round face that made her look
teenage young, but on closer inspection she was more Lyman's age,
mid-thirties. She laughed and crossed the gap to their little republic
and threw her arms around Lyman's neck. "Crispy Christ, what are *you*
doing here?"
"I work with these guys!" He turned to Arnold and Kurt. "This is my
cousin Sara," he said. "These are Albert and Kurt. I'm helping them
out."
"Hi, Sara," Kurt said.
"Hey, Kurt," she said looking away. It was clear even to Alan that they
knew each other already. The other bookstore people were looking on with
suspicion, drinking their beer out of refillable coffee-store thermos
cups.
"It's great to meet you!" Alan said taking her hand in both of his and
shaking it hard. "I'm really glad you folks came down."
She looked askance at him, but Lyman interposed himself. "Now, Sara,
these guys really, really wanted to talk something over with you all,
but they've been having a hard time getting a hearing."
Kurt and Alan traded uneasy glances. They'd carefully planned out a
subtle easeway into this conversation, but Lyman was running with it.
"You didn't know that I was involved, huh?"
"Surprised the hell outta me," Lyman said. "Will you hear them out?"
She looked back at her collective. "What the hell. Yeah, I'll talk 'em
into it."
#
"It starts with the sinking of the *Titanic*," Kurt said. They'd
arranged their mismatched chairs in a circle in the cramped back room of
the bookstore and were drinking and eating organic crumbly things with
the taste and consistency of mud-brick. Sara told Kurt that they'd have
ten minutes, and Alan had told him that he could take it all. Alan'd
spent the day reading on the net, remembering the arguments that had
swayed the most people, talking it over. He was determined that Kurt
would win this fight.
"There's this ship going down, and it's signaling S-O-S, S-O-S, but the
message didn't get out, because the shipping lanes were full of other
ships with other radios, radios that clobbered the *Titanic*'s
signal. That's because there were no rules for radio back then, so
anyone could light up any transmitter and send out any signal at any
frequency. Imagine a room where everyone shouted at the top of their
lungs, nonstop, while setting off air horns.
"After that, they decided that fed regulators would divide up the radio
spectrum into bands, and give those bands to exclusive licensees who'd
know that their radio waves would reach their destination without being
clobbered, because any clobberers would get shut down by the cops.
"But today, we've got a better way: We can make radios that are capable
of intelligently cooperating with each other. We can make radios that
use databases or just finely tuned listeners to determine what bands
aren't in use, at any given moment, in any place. They can talk between
the gaps in other signals. They can relay messages for other
radios. They can even try to detect the presence of dumb radio devices,
like TVs and FM tuners, and grab the signal they're meant to be
receiving off of the Internet and pass it on, so that the dumb device
doesn't even realize that the world has moved on.
"Now, the original radio rules were supposed to protect free expression
because if everyone was allowed to speak at once, no one would be
heard. That may have been true, but it was a pretty poor system as it
went: Mostly, the people who got radio licenses were cops, spooks, and
media barons. There aren't a lot of average people using the airwaves to
communicate for free with one another. Not a lot of free speech.
"But now we have all this new technology where computers direct the
operation of flexible radios, radios whose characteristics are
determined by software, and it's looking like the scarcity of the
electromagnetic spectrum has been pretty grossly overstated. It's hard
to prove, because now we've got a world where lighting up a bunch of
smart, agile radios is a crime against the 'legit' license-holders.
"But Parliament's not going to throw the airwaves open because no
elected politician can be responsible for screwing up the voters'
televisions, because that's the surest-fire way to not get
reelected. Which means that when you say, 'Hey, our freedom of speech is
being clobbered by bad laws,' the other side can say, 'Go study some
physics, hippie, or produce a working network, or shut up.'
"The radios we're installing now are about one millionth as smart as
they could be, and they use one millionth as much spectrum as they could
without stepping on anyone else's signal, but they're legal, and they're
letting more people communicate than ever. There are people all over the
world doing this, and whenever the policy wonks go to the radio cops to
ask for more radio spectrum to do this stuff with, they parade people
like us in front of them. We're like the Pinocchio's nose on the face of
the radio cops: They say that only their big business buddies can be
trusted with the people's airwaves, and we show them up for giant
liars."
He fell silent and looked at them. Adam held his breath.
Sara nodded and broke the silence. "You know, that sounds pretty cool,
actually."
#
Kurt insisted on putting up that access point, while Alan and Lyman
steadied the ladder. Sara came out and joked with Lyman, and Alan got
distracted watching them, trying to understand this notion of "cousins."
They had an easy rapport, despite all their differences, and spoke in a
shorthand of family weddings long past and crotchety relatives long
dead.
So none of them were watching when Kurt overbalanced and dropped the
Makita, making a wild grab for it, foot slipping off the rung, and
toppled backward. It was only Kurt's wild bark of panic that got Adam to
instinctively move, to hold out his arms and look up, and he caught Kurt
under the armpits and gentled him to the ground, taking the weight of
Kurt's fall in a bone-jarring crush to his rib cage.
"You okay?" Alan said once he'd gotten his breath back.
"Oof," Kurt said. "Yeah."
They were cuddled together on the sidewalk, Kurt atop him, and Lyman and
Sara bent to help them apart. "Nice catch," Lyman said. Kurt was helped
to his feet, and he declared that he'd sprained his ankle and nothing
worse, and they helped him back to his shop, where a couple of his kids
doted over him, getting him an ice pack and a pillow and his laptop and
one of the many dumpster-dived discmen from around the shop and some of
the CDs of old punk bands that he favored.
There he perched, growly as a wounded bear, master of his kingdom, for
the next two weeks, playing online and going twitchy over the missed
dumpsters going to the landfill every night without his expert picking
over. Alan visited him every day and listened raptly while Kurt gave him
the stats for the day's network usage, and Kurt beamed proud the whole
while.
#
One morning, Alan threw a clatter of toonies down on the Greek's counter
and walked around the Market, smelling the last night's staggering
pissers and the morning's blossoms.
Here were his neighbors, multicolored heads at the windows of their
sagging house adjoining his, Link and Natalie in the adjacent windows
farthest from his front door, Mimi's face suspicious at her window, and
was that Krishna behind her, watching over her shoulder, hand between
her wings, fingers tracing the scars depending from the muscles there?
He waved at them. The reluctant winter made every day feel like the day
before a holiday weekend. The bankers and the retail slaves coming into
and out of the Market had a festive air.
He waved at the neighbors, and Link waved back, and then so did Natalie,
and he hefted his sack of coffees from the Greek's suggestively, and
Mimi shut her curtains with a snap, but Natalie and Link smiled, and a
moment later they were sitting in twig chairs on his porch in their
jammies, watching the world go past as the sun began to boil the air and
the coffee tasted as good as it smelled.
"Beautiful day," Natalie said rubbing the duckling fuzz on her scalp and
closing her eyes.
"Found any work yet?" Alan said remembering his promise to put her in
touch with one of his fashionista protégés.